So Tauranga residents can save on $ and recycle all our plastics like the 6/8 largest NZ cities?

I am a ratepayerliving around Tauranga & frankly, I am sick of my kids coming home and talking about recycling 3-7 plastics when Tauranga doesn’tactually do this.

And I really hate the legacy of landfill we are leaving for our future. So I conducted an investigation. And the shame. Oh the shame of my findings.:

The Tauranga City Council Ten Year Plan is up for review. (Please note submissions are due by 20th April.) Central to all decisions is the ‘Decision Making Framework’. Two of the top eight points central to ‘what we want our city to be like?’ Are (1) Clean, Green valued environment; and (2) Living Well, wasting less.

Out of the top eight cities in New Zealand, Auckland, Wellington, Hastings-Napier, Dunedin, Christchurch and Palmerston-North all recycle plastics no.’s 3-7.
ONLY Tauranga City Council (TCC) and Hamilton City Council do not.

Yet even Hamilton CC are considering the option, and it will be easier for them to implement because they already charge rubbish and recycle collection onto rates.

What Council is failing to do is to communicate to local cash-strapped rate-payers that it will be cheaper to consolidate rubbish collection under one contractor, recycle ALL plastics 1-7, and, if council separates glass from plastics (ie. allows fortnightly collection so glass one week paper/plastics the other), the TCC will actually make money. Ie. it is in their best interest… just speak to little old
Dunedin City Council… AND RESIDENTS WILL NOT LOSE MONEY BY MOVING TO RECYCLING ALL PLASTICS.

For example: My mechanic in Tauranga, rubbish and recycle collection, currently pays $6.75 a week = $351 annually. He thinks he has a good deal.
Dunedin: $68 for recycle collection (taking the bulky 3-7 numbers reduces actual rubbish). If you then included 1 $2.10 rubbish bags a week = $177.20 Hastings $145.20 and the cheapest is Palmerston North Annual total collection fee at $144.

No recycling? = 3 rubbish bags a week at $2.70 a pop costs you $421.20. Even 2 bags cost you $280.80 over a year.
And if, like most families, you end up with a big recycle bin and 1 rubbish bag a week it will cost you $208.40 over the year.

Tauranga residents are being ripped off – economically and environmentally. Our environmental management is NOT best practice in NZ.

All these city councils clearly state the charge in their rates, so it is not some sneaky rate increase. It is saving Tauranga residents money.

And with change you, the resident that stamps your foot up and down and can’t bear the thought of one more cent on your rates bill, can look your kids in the eye and say you actually do care.

Just because the Tauranga Council have increased rates shockingly, it doesn’t mean we should stick our heads in the ground. Not at all.

For one annual lump sum of $68 (using Dunedin’s price) we can turn recycling around in Tauranga. (And I don’t see why thoughtful landlords couldn’t transparently include it in rent over the year ($1.30pw) – so that tenants don’t get a big nasty lump sum).

Tauranga’s Draft Ten Year Plan 2012-2022 is open for review, and in the full draft, Part A, pages 174-180 is the solid waste component. Their commitment to ‘progressive reduction of waste’ is a tiny 20kg (or roughly 3%) a year (but this isn’t on the plan it is on page 14 of the WBOPDC & TCC Waste Management and Minimisation plan (do Google) which is one and the same). At the moment our waste is growing at 15-17kg a year anyway. And most of the strategies are kind of, well, hopeful.

(When Taupo swapped to user pays rate funded recycling in 2002, it increased from 35% of households to 95% of households recycling, and they then are estimating by collecting no.3-7 plastics around 3 million containers additionally will be kept out of landfill! Note: Taupo has 100,000 less residents than Tauranga).

If you want to help change, make a submission. The more submissions they hear, the braver they will be at dealing with the barriers to achieving this (a) including recycling in the rates bill (b) consolidating collection under one contractor.

About Jodie

It is only by questioning and discussing and attempting to view the world our childrens children will live in, that we start to understand that life isn't a linear process - it is a room of dominoes falling.
Our world has a lot of special interests and stakeholders that by default, keep science undone, and economics hooked in the 1920's - resulting in governments that don't address the complexity that is challenging our world. From pollution to mental health (and the cost of food) to the health of our freshwater - it's complex and dynamic. What equilibrium do we want to reach - a healthy vital one or a suffering one?

5 Responses to So Tauranga residents can save on $ and recycle all our plastics like the 6/8 largest NZ cities?

Kia Ora Jodie for this informative blog. I would love to re-blog it onto my site as I am focusing on living with less plastic at the moment. Your blog is fabulous and 'kate is greedy' seems to think so. I shall tune into you both. Many thanks for your energetic, generous and provocative investigations. Emily from wild and grace – inviting the good life.

I have recently moved from Christchurch to Tauranga. I will be paying about $500 more on rates in Tauranga for a very similar property and I will have to pay for the "privilege" of recycling . In Christchurch I was given 3 wheelie bins, one for rubish, one for food scraps and one for recylcling. The rubbish and food scraps were collected weekly and the recycling was collected fortnightly. All this was part of my rates. When will the ratepayers of Tauranga wake up and vote in some more civic minded people to care for this beautiful place? Shame on us all.

Hamilton lunacy … lived in the city 13 years, three addresses and heaven alone knows how many WM drivers have collected my waste (thanks to them all btw) Today the bin was left with all of the PP5s … (takeaway food and store deli containers not taken) That's never happened before so I rang HCC to ask about it … they put the call out to WM who tell me 'Only PP1 & 2 are collected it's sorted @ the roadside' and when I point out 13 years without this ever happening before the lady replied 'What can I say, some of the drivers are lazy and don't do their job properly, they just throw everything in"

So, thirteen years of lazy drivers … yeah right tui!

Back to HCC … where an unctious jobsworth sounded ( from the tone of voice and laughter ) to be taking great pleasure in the idea that he could get on the backs of WM and tell them to 'Get right onto their drivers to enforce about waste they should be leaving behind" I asked about his job in HCC and was told 'It's to do with enforcement of byelaws …"

When I pointed out to him that that what he was suggesting would be lunacy … that there'd be tonnes more waste into landfills and additionally the next windy day there'd be loads of these things blowing round the city I was asounded by his reply

A friend has found this for me – can we get together and do something to wake people up? I find very few of my friends/neighbours realise the problem we have – their plastic just goes in the landfill. Not sure what pingback is when the dates of this thread are old. Let's do something in 2016.